The CMO Mid-Year Review Checklist: Leading an Effective Agency Roster
It’s early July and half the year flew by. CMOs everywhere are taking stock of where their business sits vis-à-vis forecast and their promises to the remainder of the C-suite. If things are going well, they want to maintain momentum. If things aren’t on track, there is a growing urgency to get back on track. […]
Marketers and Agency Execs Should Attend AdAge’s 2022 Small Agency of the Year Conference July 26 & 27
AdAge’s annual Small Agency of the Year Conference is being held in Chicago on July 26 & 27, and marketers and agency execs everywhere should attend. This event recognizes the best in small agencies from overall agency of the year to agency of the year in regions and in areas like media, experiential and international. […]
Principles to govern a respectful, effective agency review
Year in and year out, roughly a third of marketers expect to change agencies. The result is hundreds of agency selection processes. About a quarter, mostly the largest, are run by consultants. The rest – the majority – are run by the clients. Some are managed by procurement and the rest by the marketers themselves. […]
A CMO tip: your agencies have a secret advantage for you
We’ve discussed many times how the modern day CMO job is one of the hardest and most demanding jobs in the history of business. There’s so much going on. Marketing and advertising technology is changing every minute. The consumer is constantly changing as the world around them evolves and they are forced to deal with […]
CMOs can learn from P&G Brand Management’s “What Counts” factors
Recently I wrote about having come across a fantastic one-page document: The Ten Commandments of Leadership. It was from the early 1980’s, early in my tenure at Procter & Gamble. That post generated a great deal of positive feedback, with ample praise as well as suggestions on how the list could be modernized. You can […]
A CMO tip: streamline the to-do list to get more done
There is an epidemic of wishful thinking in industry today: objectives that are too lofty, priority lists that are overwhelming and bottomless project lists are the norm. Wall Street has lofty expectations and company leadership often demands more than their organizations have the capacity to deliver. And they certainly often demand more than their organizations […]
P&G’s 10 Commandments of Leadership, Early 1980’s
I was cleaning out some old files and came across a fantastic one-page document: The Ten Commandments of Leadership. It was from the early 1980’s, early in my tenure at Procter & Gamble. I don’t remember anything regarding who wrote it or the intended purpose… but boy has it aged well! This probably shouldn’t come […]
How to be a great CMO
A few months ago I wrote about SpencerStuart’s latest annual CMO Tenure Study. The report highlighted a continued decline in average CMO tenure, with average tenure declining to its lowest point since 2009. Median tenure had plummeted to 25.5 months, the lowest on record. Being a CMO is a tough, tough job. Frankly, it has […]
CMO checklist: before you run an agency review
The best work often comes from a long-standing client-agency relationship. The agency team has a deep understanding of the client’s business and brand, keeps a close eye on competition and knows which levers to pull to help their client succeed. This basic principle holds true for client-agency relationships of all types, from creative, media and […]
Better clients get better agency work: the checklist
Good clients get good work. We’ve been repeating that phrase for close to thirty years. We’ve seen it in action during our consulting engagements with hundreds of clients of all sizes and shapes. We’ve seen it in the results of the hundreds of annual 360 reviews we’ve conducted (clients and agencies evaluating each other) in […]